“On the 2nd of April, 1891, at quarter to ten in Brühl, Germany, Max Ernst hatched out of an egg laid by his mother in a falcon’s nest, on which the bird sat for over seven years” (Glenn, 2008). This is allegedly how the painter, inseparably tied to the history of Dada and surrealism as one of their founders and leading representatives, described his birth. Our surrealism series begins today with a part dedicated to the genius who applied his talents in painting without any kind of academic background. If you’re planning to review Ernst’s work in the Albertina Museum in Vienna, you’ll surely find this short survey useful.

Max Ernst was born as the third out of nine children into a Christian middle class family residing in the town of Brühl near Cologne, Germany. Although his father ruled the family in a strict manner, his fondness of painting inspired young Ernst to take it up as well. Aside from this ‘home schooling’, Ernst never received any formal artistic education and instead went on to develop his own painting techniques.

In 1911 he befriended August Macke and joined his group Die Rheinischen Expressionisten (the Rheinish Expressionists) while he was already determined at that time that a life of a scholar or a scientist was not for him. Before finishing his studies of philosophy and psychology in 1914, he was quite busy with other things: he encountered the works of Cézanne, Picasso, Munch and van Gogh at an exhibition in Cologne, in 1913 he met Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and the year after that Jean Arp, who became his lifelong friend.

Then came the First World War. Max Ernst was conscripted into the German army and served on both the Western and Eastern fronts. Despite his experiences, he was able to continue in the work he embarked on and in 1916 he took part in an exhibition organized by the expressionist magazine Der Sturm in Berlin (both German and French artists contributed to the magazine despite their countries leaders’ war-induced hatreds for each other). A year after the war, he introduced – together with J. T. Baargeld – Dada in Cologne and began creating his first collages. The horrors of war, which he experienced first hand, naturally had a profound, long-lasting impact on his work, be it the objects or the visual techniques of his works.

Les a slunce / Forest and Sun, 1931. (Frotáž) Zdroj: moma.org

In 1922 he flew to Paris where he joined the emerging surrealist movement led by Paul Éluard (also one of his close friends) and André Breton. He stayed in Paris until 1941 and achieved the status of one of the foremost artists of the Avant-garde and an important founding member of the surrealist movement, although he and many others had been excluded by Breton or they left on their own. He pioneered the artistic technique of frottage and, together with Joan Miró, grattage, which involves scraping dry paint off the canvas to uncover the layers beneath.

Thanks to his immediate contact with a number of prominent artists, Ernst experienced no lack of inspiration or opportunities for co-operation – for instance, he collaborated with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel on producing the film The Golden Age (L’Âge d’or). Although Ernst’s life as a fledgling artist in Paris may have been rich in creative and intellectual respects, he found himself struggling financially. In the beginning he lived in abject poverty, staying illegally in France in a ménage à trois with Gala and Paul Éluard.

In 1934, Ernst took up sculpting in which he received help from Alberto Giacometti. He was interned three times until he in 1941 emigrated with Peggy Guggenheim to America, where he married her as his third wife.

It was her as a patron and collector of art who already in 1938 bought a number of Ernst’s paintings and who contributed greatly to Ernst and other artists (e.g. Marcel Duchamp and Marc Chagall) driven out of Europe by fascism becoming the darlings of the American public. In America they inspired the birth of a new movement, later known as abstract expressionism.

Ernst’s refusal to use solely the traditional methods of painting and his drive to invent his own, new techniques captured the imagination of young artists who were looking for fresh and original approaches to artistic work. Ernst’s great influence is noticeable namely in Jackson Pollock, who appreciated Ernst’s collages as well as his use of art as a channel for expressing one’s intimate, inner states. After the war, Jimmy, Ernst’s son from his first marriage who was born in 1920, became a well-known abstract painter who helped to strengthen his father’s influence on the formation of the movement by providing contacts to key abstract expressionists, including the aforementioned Pollock or Willem De Kooning.

In 1946, Ernst married an American artist Dorothea Tanning in a double ceremony together with Man Ray and Juliet Browner. In the 1950s they returned to France. Max Ernst died there in 1976 as a influential and widely recognized artist.